The government has been urged to take a second look at involving private sector participation in the management of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) in order to derive value for money in its operation.
The fact that the Power Distribution Services (PDS) deal went south should not completely bury the idea of getting private involvement in the sector to ensure efficiency.
Executive Director of the Institute for Energy Security (IES), Nana Amoasi VII who made the call argued another attempt should, however, involve civil society organizations, the media and the Ghanaian public in the privatization process to forestall what happened under the PDS deal.
“If we still want to own ECG as Ghana government 100%, I am sure we’ll come back to this question after ten years and will still discuss the inefficiency in the system and the burden that it bestows on the Ghanaian,” he said.
Speaking during an interview on Energy News Africa Nana Amoasi VII stated that any appointment to head the institution will only be as good as the resources the person can gather to run the company.
According to him, ECG currently needs huge capital injection because it does not have the ability to engineer cash inflow and stressed that any new director will need to assure Ghanaians what he/she can do beyond privatization to bring about efficiency into the system.
Political interference
Nana Amoasi VII averred that political interference in the power distribution sector and the work of ECG and Gridco is very troubling hence the need to bring private hands so the government can cede some of its control.
He stressed that the wish to have 100% of zero may be okay but argued owning 50% of even ten makes more sense than owning 100% of a negative number because ECG and Gridco are making losses year on year.
He averred that for political expediency governments have pampered customers for too long leading to standoffs, open power theft and destruction of transformers by communities who do not wish to pay for the electricity they consume, citing Tamale and Yilo Krobo incidents as examples.
Thermal power generation
According to him, today’s power sector is not what it used to be when Ghana was exclusively generating power from hydro that was largely government-owned.
He said, “Today almost 68% of the power consumed comes from thermal generation and this is largely owned by independent power producers. They have to be paid or one day they will just pull the plug and the whole country will be plunged into darkness.”
“So what needs to be done must be done if we need to have a cost-reflective tariff so be it because the power is produced by private hands and must be paid for.”
The IES boss noted that the Ghanaian public is also partly to be blamed for the challenges of ECG and Gridco and indicated that people steal power, temper with meters, defer payments or sometimes flatly refuse to pay for the electricity they consume due to political connections.
Ghanaians, he said, must be supportive of the government and state-owned enterprises in the value chain to ensure a consistent and reliable power supply.
